Ray Manzarek, who has died aged 74, was the keyboardist with The Doors, doing
every bit as much to shape the band’s dark, psychedelic sound as its
charismatic, Dionysian lead singer, Jim Morrison.

Manzarek did not try to compete with Morrison’s astonishing good looks or Lizard King demeanour. The frontman’s long ringlets, leather trousers, and what Manzarek called his “absolutely sexual” persona, fuelled a near-hysterical popular following; to this day — 42 years after his premature death at the age of 27 — fans flock to Morrison’s grave in Paris.

By contrast, Manzarek’s rimless glasses and early appearances in jacket and tie lent him a donnish air. But this was misleading. He was, and remained to the end of his life, just as rooted as Morrison in the hippie, anti-Establishment ideals of the late Sixties. Even so, he provided the drive and musical discipline to shape Morrison’s vague rock and roll aspirations into something more concrete. Without Morrison, it is certain that The Doors would not have become the cultural force they were; yet without Manzarek, The Doors probably would not have existed at all.

In the six years after the band formed in 1965, Manzarek and Morrison (with the addition of John Densmore on drums and Robby Krieger on guitar) produced a string of enduring hits, such as Light My Fire; People Are Strange; Riders on the Storm; Break on Through; Touch Me; LA Woman; and The End. Though all four band members took credit for writing the songs, they were principally marked out by Morrison’s raw baritone and Manzarek’s riffs and solos on his Vox Continental organ.

The keyboardist’s fluid, trippy licks and flourishes brought a carnivalesque air to a musical outfit that embraced and promoted the anarchy and grotesquery of the circus sideshow. But such exuberance rested on an essential foundation of training and technique. Above all, Manzarek drew on years of playing jazz and boogie-woogie basslines with his left hand, experience that allowed him to improvise and play melodies with his right hand “while the left hand just goes and goes and goes”. As a result, The Doors were able to dispense with a bass player in favour of a 32-note Fender Roads bass keyboard attached to the Vox Continental.

“On the piano bass, or like Riders on the Storm, I played repetitive bass lines that are just like boogie-woogie,” Manzarek said in 1998. “It just keeps going, but I had done that over and over as a kid. So it was very easy for me to do.”

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Manzarek drew on other apparently unlikely inspirations. On Light My Fire, for example, the band fleshed out a half-written song by Robby Krieger with chord changes based on John Coltrane’s My Favourite Things. Once they were satisfied with their efforts they pondered how to launch into what was “basically a jazz structure”. “So I put my Bach hat on,” said Manzarek. “And came up with a cycle of fifths.”

The resulting introductory organ motif, forged from the German Baroque by way of 1960s LA psychedelia, made Light My Fire one of rock’s most famous songs. When it was released early in 1967, the single rocketed to No 1, and The Doors were on their way to becoming one of the world’s most famous bands.

Ray Daniel Manczarek Jnr was born on February 12 1939 in Chicago, to Helen and Raymond Manczarek. (He later dropped the “c” from his surname.) At school he was a talented basketball player, but gave up the game following a disagreement with his coach. He read Economics at Chicago’s DePaul University before, in 1962, moving to the West Coast to study film at UCLA.

While there he met a fellow student, James Morrison, but the two did not become particularly close until shortly after they had both finished their courses, in 1965. Then, as Manzarek described it: “I’m sitting on the beach wondering what I’m going to do with myself. Who comes walking down the beach but James Douglas Morrison, looking great. I said: 'Well, good, man, cool, tell me what’s going on?’ And he said: 'Well, I’ve been living on a rooftop consuming a bit of LSD, and writing songs.’ And I said: 'Whoa, writing songs. OK, man, cool, like sing me a song.’ And so he sat down on the beach, dug his hands into the sand, and began to sing Moonlight Drive in a haunted whisper kind of voice. And I thought: 'Ooooh, I can put little jazz chords and I can put some kind of bluesy stuff. And I said: 'Man, this is incredible. Let’s get a rock and roll band together.’ And he said: 'That’s exactly what I want to do.” And I said: 'All right, man, but what do we call the band?’ He said: 'We’re going to call it The Doors.’ And I said: 'You mean like the doors of perception; the doors in your mind?’ He said: 'No, no. Just The Doors.’ That was it. We were The Doors.”

The pair set out to recruit a drummer and a guitarist. In the event, Manzarek met Densmore in his transcendental meditation class, and Densmore brought in his friend Krieger to complete the line-up. The band’s first gigs were at the London Fog club in Hollywood. Buoyed by success, they moved from playing five sets a night there to headlining at the celebrated Whisky A Go-Go. In early 1967 their first single – Break on Through (to the Other Side) – barely grazed the charts. Then came Light My Fire.

It was the first of 15 hit singles that the band notched up as their following swelled. But the antics which drove fans wild also infuriated the authorities. Producers of The Ed Sullivan Show were outraged when Morrison sang the word “higher” on air, which the band had agreed not to do. And as the years went by, Morrison’s excesses only worsened. In 1969 he was accused of exposing himself on stage and arrested. In March 1971 he went to live in Paris, where he was found dead in a bathtub four months later, possibly of a heroin overdose.

The band never recovered, though Krieger and Manzarek attempted to fill in for Morrison by performing vocals. Two new LPs, Other Voices and Full Circle achieved nothing of the popularity of the albums with Morrison, and The Doors disbanded in 1973. “It took a long time to get over Jim’s death,” Manzarek said. “That was real sad; that was a sad, sad period for me.”

Ray Manzarek continued to play and perform for the rest of his life, forming a new band, Nite City, and embarking on other ventures, such as a rock adaptation of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. In the 1980s he turned to producing, working on four albums by the Los Angeles punk band, X. “The punks were the next generation after the psychedelic era,” he said. “After the stoners came the punks, and it was great.”

In 1991 the film director Oliver Stone released a biopic about the band entitled The Doors, with Val Kilmer playing Morrison and Kyle MacLachlan as Manzarek. Yet the keyboardist was dismissive of the picture, deriding it as a travesty that “portrays Jim as a violent, drunken fool. That wasn’t Jim.”

In recent years Manzarek and Krieger started touring again together, playing Doors music, but without Densmore, who successfully launched a lawsuit to prevent the duo using The Doors’ name. The three men also fell out in court over Densmore’s refusal to let The Doors’ music be used in advertising campaigns.

Manzarek wrote a memoir in 1998, Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors. In 2002 he produced The Poet In Exile, a novel about the legend that Jim Morrison faked his own death and lives on. “I don’t know what I believe,” he said in 1998. “I haven’t heard from him in 27 years now. I assume he’s dead. But there’s a lot of stories. How did he die? We don’t know.”

Ray Manzarek married, in 1967, Dorothy Fujikawa, who survives him with their son.